The birth of the modern car occurred in Germany over 150 years ago. The first internal combustion, a petroleum-fueled motorcycle came out of Germany 25 years later. In the United States, the Henry Ford Company was established in 1901. A year later it morphed into Cadillac Motor Company which Ford left, along with the rights to his name. A new Ford Motor Company emerged in 1903 in Detroit with backing from a dozen investors, including the Dodge brothers. The same year, 1903, Harley-Davidson was founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its chief rival was the Indian Motorcycle Co. which had already emerged two years earlier, in 1901, from a bicycle manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts. Much has changed since those early automotive years, but perhaps nothing more so than styling in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, and America’s love affair with cars and motorcycles, which expressed itself artistically and culturally in so many ways.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, cars and motorcycles have not only been ubiquitous on the nation’s streets and highways, but also in the film, top forty hits, and in painting. With the emergence of photo-realism in the 1960s, motor vehicles assumed a special place of distinction as subject matter in the iconography of American art.

— David J Wagner, museum curator